It has been announced that Noriyoshi Ohrai—the Japanese illustrator best known for producing remarkable poster art for Metal Gear Solid as well as for films including the Godzilla series and Star Wars: Episode V – The Empire Strikes Back—passed away from pneumonia yesterday morning at the age of 79.

With a career spanning over half a century and an impressive portfolio of artworks for novels, games and well-known international movie releases, fans around the world are mourning the loss of a great talent and taking a look back at his extraordinary body of work.

Video game developer and publisher Konami denied an earlier report by The New Yorker that Metal Gear series creator Hideo Kojima had left Konami. Konami stated that “Kojima is currently taking an extended vacation, and is currently still registered as an employee.”

The release of Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain has been met with as much excitement and frenzy as you might expect from the latest instalment of a legendary video game franchise. But while most players are preoccupied with riding D. Horse around, frolicking in cardboard boxes and puzzling over the intricate story, it’s a certain voiceover that’s had us scratching our heads. Where on earth have we heard iDroid‘s soothing tones before? Oh, that’s right – on the Shinkansen!

Voice actor and vocalist Donna Burke is a veteran of the video game industry, lending her vocal cords to multiple games including MGSV and Silent Hill, and she ALSO provided the English-language spoken announcement that’s broadcast on the bullet train to help foreign visitors navigate their way around Japan!

With Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain now available, gamers are hunkering down to complete Hideo Kojima’s final Metal Gear outing, and the last couple of days have seen a flurry of uploads to YouTube and gaming sites from players wanting to show off their discoveries in the huge open world.

One such discovery has people lamenting the cancellation of Silent Hills, the horror game that was at one time to be Kojima’s next project, all over again. Despite Konami’s attempts to erase its existence by removing it from the Playstation Store, P.T., the playable teaser for the cancelled game, can’t be wiped from gamers’ minds that easily, and apparently not from the company’s latest hit, either.

From the consumer end, it’s easy to mistakenly assume that video game publishers’ only concerns are creating art and providing fun. The reality, though, is that like with any human endeavor, time and money are always limiting factors in game development, and while an abundance of one can sometimes help cover for a lack of the other, at the end of the day there are only so many resources to go around, and companies can’t greenlight every project pitched to them.

But that just makes it all the more heart-warming when a major publisher gives the go-ahead to a new installment of a fan-favorite. Remember how a few months ago Konamihalted digital distribution of horror sensation P.T. and the associated Silent Hills, the daydream-come-to-life collaboration between game and film directors Hideo Kojima and Guillermo del Toro? All water under the bridge, because there’s a brand new Silent Hill game coming in October, and it’ll cost less than a buck to play!

Konami is even being bold enough to take the franchise into an entirely new genre: pachinko.

By now, the video gaming community is all but painfully aware of the sudden divorce between game director Hideo Kojima and game developer Konami. Solid Snake himself has even tweeted the fact that studio Kojima Productions has been disbanded, the studio logo having been removed from advertisement posters for the upcoming title, Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain.

When the mobile game Flappy Bird was taken off the market last year, sales of mobile phones with the game installed were quickly put on auction sites to the tune of US$300 to US$90,000. The sales on eBay technically violated the site’s Terms of Service, which required smartphones and tablets to be restored to their factory settings. Many were pulled by eBay before anyone was able to drop cash on the listings.

If you have even a passing interest in video games, then you’ll no doubt have heard that Silent Hills, the new, crazy-scary, Daryl-from-The Walking Dead-featuring reboot of long-running survival horror series Silent Hill, has been cancelled.

For many, Silent Hills represented the sole reason to own a PlayStation 4 as it bobs along in a sea of multi-platform titles and high-definition re-releases of last-gen games. But with the removal of its “playable teaser” from the PlayStation Store today, Silent Hills is gone – poof – into dust because director and industry veteran Hideo Kojima is to part ways with parent company Konami the moment he finishes work on his other big project, Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain.

But what exactly is going on over at Konami? And why on earth would the company scrap a game that was already garnering so much praise and generating such excitement? Join us after the jump as we explore the myriad rumours and theories regarding Kojima and Konami’s messy breakup.